My First Program
I was probably about five or six years old when my dad brought home a Columbia Personal Computer -- a 32-pound “luggable†PC Clone with a Z80 processor, 128 Kb of RAM, two 5? floppy disk drives, and a 320x200 CGA monochrome monitor.? It was awesome. I quickly became obsessed with the thing and was inseparable.? It came with a space invaders clone called Space Commanders that I played so much the ink rubbed off the left and right arrow keys on the keyboard.
My dad eventually took pity on me and brought home a copy of David H Ahi’s Basic Computer Games book.? This book didn’t teach you how to program (at least not intentionally) -- it contained the printed source code for a hundred games that you could type into your computer and try playing. If you were super lucky, you had a spare floppy disk (or tape drive) and could save the program -- but many of us just had to re-enter the programs every time we restarted the computer.?
It tuned out that repeatedly entering in the same programs from a book over and over is an excellent way to learn how to program -- and eventually, the code started to make sense to me.? I decided I would set out to write my first program.? Being a patriotic Canadian, I decided to write a program to draw the Canadian flag and play the first few notes of Oh Canada (using the new SOUND command added in MS Basic 3.5).??
Unfortunately, as many UX designers have learned in their careers, just because you can dream something up does not mean you can code it.? I couldn’t draw a credible Canadian flag using ASCII, but drawing an American flag was within reach.? So, I pivoted, and my first completed program drew an American flag on the screen and played the first few notes of Oh Canada!
It was a great lesson in agile development and pushing back on unrealistic PM requirements. What was your first computer program? Please take a minute and comment below -- I would love to hear from as many people as possible!
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Senior Software Engineer @ Microsoft | PhD, Computational Statistics
3 å¹´Oh that one's thought provoking! I must have been 7 years old or so and it was on an Amstrad CPC that had somehow made it to our side of the iron curtain. It was a basic (as in the language) program that did my math homework, all I had to do was copy the results from the computer screen to my notebook and nobody was the wiser!
Leadership | Collaboration | Information Technology | Software Development | Program & Product Management | Consulting
3 å¹´My first program was a rotating "barber pole" on an Apple ][. But I vividly remember creating all sorts of ASCII graphics and using the SOUND command to make things like a "talking" R2-D2 and to play songs like "The Entertainer". Good memories.
Principal Product Manager @ Microsoft | Security Copilot
3 å¹´Mine was the typical "Hello, World!". Thanks for sharing, I got a good laugh out of your first lesson on "pushing back on unrealistic PM requirements" ??
Engineering Leader | Fractional CTO | Startups, Enterprise, B2B, B2C
3 å¹´Also distinctly un-Canadian... Mine was a G.I. Joe choose your own adventure in Basic on a Commodore PET. Pretty sure I spent most of the time animating an elevator in ASCII
Group Engineering Manager at Microsoft
3 å¹´First program wasn't until university. Before that I didn't know how to write a single line of code (some say I still don't :P). It was a website or something, the only thing I clearly remember was that the first programming language we were taught was PHP.... an interesting decision.